Anna Karenina eBook

An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a
public scandal, which would be a perfect godsend to
his enemies for calumny and attacks on his high position
in society. His chief object, to define the
position with the least amount of disturbance possible,
would not be attained by divorce either. Moreover,
in the event of divorce, or even of an attempt to
obtain a divorce, it was obvious that the wife broke
off all relations with the husband and threw in her
lot with the lover. And in spite of the complete,
as he supposed, contempt and indifference he now felt
for his wife, at the bottom of his heart Alexey Alexandrovitch
still had one feeling left in regard to her—­a
disinclination to see her free to throw in her lot
with Vronsky, so that her crime would be to her advantage.
The mere notion of this so exasperated Alexey Alexandrovitch,
that directly it rose to his mind he groaned with
inward agony, and got up and changed his place in
the carriage, and for a long while after, he sat with
scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in
the fleecy rug.

“Apart from formal divorce, One might still
do like Karibanov, Paskudin, and that good fellow
Dram—­that is, separate from one’s
wife,” he went on thinking, when he had regained
his composure. But this step too presented the
same drawback of public scandal as a divorce, and
what was more, a separation, quite as much as a regular
divorce, flung his wife into the arms of Vronsky.
“No, it’s out of the question, out of
the question!” he said again, twisting his rug
about him again. “I cannot be unhappy,
but neither she nor he ought to be happy.”

The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during
the period of uncertainty, had passed away at the
instant when the tooth had been with agony extracted
by his wife’s words. But that feeling
had been replaced by another, the desire, not merely
that she should not be triumphant, but that she should
get due punishment for her crime. He did not
acknowledge this feeling, but at the bottom of his
heart he longed for her to suffer for having destroyed
his peace of mind—­his honor. And going
once again over the conditions inseparable from a
duel, a divorce, a separation, and once again rejecting
them, Alexey Alexandrovitch felt convinced that there
was only one solution,—­to keep her with
him, concealing what had happened from the world, and
using every measure in his power to break off the
intrigue, and still more—­though this he
did not admit to himself—­to punish her.
“I must inform her of my conclusion, that thinking
over the terrible position in which she has placed
her family, all other solutions will be worse for
both sides than an external status quo, and
that such I agree to retain, on the strict condition
of obedience on her part to my wishes, that is to
say, cessation of all intercourse with her lover.”
When this decision had been finally adopted, another
weighty consideration occurred to Alexey Alexandrovitch
in support of it. “By such a course only
shall I be acting in accordance with the dictates
of religion,” he told himself. “In
adopting this course, I am not casting off a guilty
wife, but giving her a chance of amendment; and, indeed,
difficult as the task will be to me, I shall devote
part of my energies to her reformation and salvation.”